Another Inventor Of The Internet Wants To Gag It

Lawrence Roberts is just another guy with the title:" Inventor of the Internet" in news articles. According to Wikipedia, he's the father of networking through data packets. And he's turned his attention to everyone's favorite data packet topic: Peer-to-Peer filesharing. He's established a company called Anagran, and says their devices can sort out which file transfers on the tubes are P2P, and -- you guessed it -- can throttle them in favor of other, more "high-priority" traffic.At Structure 08, he laid out the problem: 5 percent of the Net's users are running P2P transfers taking up 80 percent of its capacity, which is dramatically limiting the available bandwidth available to everyone else. Roberts' company, Anagran, is able to detect which "flows" are P2P traffic, and reduce the bandwidth available to these communications when other users' systems want it. Roberts says that Anagran's technology even functions when P2P transfers are encrypted.

ANAGRAN's FR-1000

One of the products currently offered by ANAGRAN, the FR-1000 Intelligent Flow Manager has a feature set geared specifically toward shaping network traffic. A sampling form the product page is available below.

High Quality of Experience for Streaming Media: When loss-susceptible traffic like IPTV and VoIP overload their capacity, packet discard creates noise, jitter, and freeze-frame in all flows. IFD selectively invokes call admission control (CAC) on specific flows only; either the lowest priority or the most recent, for sustained high quality voice and video even during periods of intense user demand.

Bulk Data and P2P Management: Managing flow rates by service class with BTC throttles bandwidth-hungry traffic like P2P to allow all services (including P2P!) to flourish even when network links become congested.

Powerful Traffic Inspection and Awareness: Real-time capture of all flow statistics enables inspection, logging, and analysis for all traffic in the network. Find out what is really happening in your network.

Improved Performance: Fast Flow Technology improves trunk utilization by up to 300% while adding zero incremental delay. For the first time, bandwidth utilization is maximized without adding any latency.

According to Roberts, 80 percent of Internet traffic is generated by 5 percent of users, and that 80 percent is used for P2P filesharing. I have a feeling Mr. Roberts will finally make some money off that Internet he invented if the device works, as ISPs would love to have a way to shuffle Bittorrents of Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo to the back of the queue. I also predict he will become an object of more intense detestation than anyone outside an RIAA office on the Internet he invented, if his device works and is put into general use.

There sure are a lot of people who are referred to as "Inventor of the Internet." Of course we could tell the old joke about Al Gore inventing the Internet, but of course we know he invented weather, not the Internet.